and very wintery. the christmas baking is finally underway here. we began not with the traditional sugar cookies or gingerbread cookies but with a batch of chocolate peppermint cake pops. i used this basic chocolate cake recipe (which i've bookmarked for future use — it's a good one!) and from there just sort of followed several cake-pop recipes from various web sources (mixing the cake with frosting). to get them minty-fresh i added a few drops of peppermint extract to the melted chocolate and sprinkled the final pops with some crushed candy canes. a little bit of cool and a little bit of fun for all.
